Best Selling Books by Karen Russell

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The bravely imagined, wildly acclaimed debut novel from the author of Vampires in the Lemon Grove—about a thirteen year old girl who sets out on a mission through magical swamps to save her family. "Ms. Russell is one in a million.... A suspensfuly, deeply haunted book." —The New York Times Thirteen-year-old Ava Bigtree has lived her entire life at Swamplandia!, her family’s island home and gator-wrestling theme park in the Florida Everglades. But when illness fells Ava’s mother, the park’s indomitable headliner, the family is plunged into chaos; her father withdraws, her sister falls in love with a spooky character known as the Dredgeman, and her brilliant big brother, Kiwi, defects to a rival park called The World of Darkness. As Ava embarks on her mission to save them all, we are drawn into a lush debut that takes us to the shimmering edge of reality.

From the author of the novel Swamplandia!—a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—comes a magical and uniquely daring collection of stories that showcases the author’s gifts at their inimitable best. Within these pages, a community of girls held captive in a Japanese silk factory slowly transmute into human silkworms and plot revolution; a group of boys stumble upon a mutilated scarecrow that bears an uncanny resemblance to a missing classmate that they used to torment; a family’s disastrous quest for land in the American West has grave consequences; and in the marvelous title story, two vampires in a sun-drenched lemon grove try to slake their thirst for blood and come to terms with their immortal relationship. Named a Best Book of the Year by: The Boston Globe O, The Oprah Magazine Huffington Post The A.V. Club A Washington Post Notable Book An NPR Great Read of 2013

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • From Pulitzer finalist, MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and bestselling author of Swamplandia! and Vampires in the Lemon Grove Karen Russell: a gripping dust bowl epic about five characters whose fates become entangled after a storm ravages their small Nebraskan town “Achingly gorgeous. . . . Karen Russell is one of our most humane and generous writers; this book is as profound as it is wonderfully strange.” —Lauren Groff, author of The Vaster Wilds The Antidote opens on Black Sunday, as a historic dust storm ravages the fictional town of Uz, Nebraska. But Uz is already collapsing—not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought but beneath its own violent histories. The Antidote follows a "Prairie Witch,” whose body serves as a bank vault for peoples’ memories and secrets; a Polish wheat farmer who learns how quickly a hoarded blessing can become a curse; his orphan niece, a basketball star and witch’s apprentice in furious flight from her grief; a voluble scarecrow; and a New Deal photographer whose time-traveling camera threatens to reveal both the town’s secrets and its fate. Russell''s novel is above all a reckoning with a nation’s forgetting—enacting the settler amnesia and willful omissions passed down from generation to generation, and unearthing not only horrors but shimmering possibilities. The Antidote echoes with urgent warnings for our own climate emergency, challenging readers with a vision of what might have been—and what still could be.

These ten extraordinary stories introduce a new talent who opens a world to readers--the surreal marshes of the Florida Everglades where outlandish predicaments magically reveal the truth about one''s life.

In this revelatory story about first love from Karen Russell’s Orange World, a young man falls in love with a two thousand year old girl that he’s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. Through a darkly comic lens, Russell explores the vertigo of falling in and out of love, and the way that our shallow projections and fairytale fantasies can cover over the mysterious reality of another human being. A Vintage Short.

Charting loss, love, and the difficult art of growing up, these stories unfurl with wicked humour and insight. Two young boys make midnight trips to a boat graveyard in search of their dead sister, who set sail in the exoskeleton of a giant crab; a boy whose dreams foretell implacable tragedies is sent to ''Sleepaway Camp for Disordered Dreamers'' (Cabin 1, Narcoleptics; Cabin 2, Insomniacs; Cabin 3, Somnambulists. . . ); a Minotaur leads his family on the trail out West, and finally, in the collection''s poignant and hilarious title story, fifteen girls raised by wolves are painstakingly re-civilised by nuns. These ten extraordinary stories introduce an audacious new talent, and a world in which weird and wonderful predicaments magically reveal the truth of our own lives. A blazingly original voice, a dazzling debut, a breathtaking discovery.

Newly illustrated and available for the first time in years, a haunting novella from the uncannily imaginative author of the national bestsellers Swamplandia! and Orange World: the story of a deadly insomnia epidemic and the lengths one woman will go to to fight it. Trish Edgewater is the Slumber Corps'' top recruiter. On the phone, at a specially organized Sleep Drive, even in a supermarket parking lot: Trish can get even the most reluctant healthy dreamer to donate sleep to an insomniac in crisis--one of hundreds of thousands of people who have totally lost the ability to sleep. Trish cries, she shakes, she shows potential donors a picture of her deceased sister, Dori: one of the first victims of the lethal insomnia plague that has swept the globe. Run by the wealthy and enigmatic Storch brothers, the Slumber Corps is at the forefront of the fight against this deadly new disease. But when Trish is confronted by "Baby A," the first universal sleep donor, and the mysterious "Donor Y," whose horrific infectious nightmares are threatening to sweep through the precious sleep supply, her faith in the organization and in her own motives begins to falter. Fully illustrated with dreamy evocations of Russell''s singular imagination and featuring a brand-new "Nightmare Appendix," Sleep Donation will keep readers up long into the night and long after haunt their dreams.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE WASHINGTON POST • NPR • GOOD HOUSEKEEPING • FRESH AIR • THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS • LIT HUB • KIRKUS REVIEWS • LIBRARY JOURNAL • THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY Karen Russell''s comedic genius and mesmerizing talent for creating outlandish predicaments that uncannily mirror our inner lives is on full display in these eight exuberant, arrestingly vivid, unforgettable stories. In "Bog Girl," a young man falls in love with a two-thousand-year-old girl that he''s extracted from a mass of peat in a Northern European bog. In "The Prospectors," two opportunistic young women fleeing the Great Depression strike out for new territory, and find themselves fighting for their lives. And in the brilliant, hilarious title story, a new mother desperate to ensure her infant''s safety strikes a diabolical deal, agreeing to breastfeed the devil in exchange for his protection. The landscape in which these stories unfold is a feral, slippery, purgatorial space, bracketed by the void--yet within it Russell captures the exquisite beauty and tenderness of ordinary life. Orange World is a miracle of storytelling from a true modern master.

This streamlined, step-by-step guide provides students and newcomers in the field of media with an overview of the complete production process, from conceiving of an idea to marketing the final product. Readers will learn what it takes to create a concept, develop it, and then market and sell it. Chapters discuss pitching, producing, marketing visionary concepts, financing, and distributing content. Focused on traditional and non-traditional platforms including social media, websites, and online advertising, this book explores currently evolving media platforms, ideas, and practices and provides examples of how to navigate these unique creative processes. Interviews with business executives offer insider tips and tricks to creating a marketable project. In this book, you will learn how to: Distinguish between a "great idea" and a "marketable idea." Condense your concept into an effective "elevator pitch." Build a basic business plan. Create a marketing strategy, be it traditional, digital, or both. Establish a personal brand and portfolio that will grab the right attention. This book will be of great help to the student, independent filmmaker, and content creator looking to understand the process of getting their work produced, distributed, and marketed.

Finaliste du Prix Pulitzer pour son formidable roman Swamplandia, la jeune Karen Russell, à l''imaginaire débridé, excelle dans tous les registres et s''impose une fois encore, avec ce recueil, comme un maître du réalisme magique. Des fillettes retenues prisonnières dans une manufacture japonaise sont lentement métamorphosées en vers à soie... Une masseuse se découvre dotée d''étranges pouvoirs en manipulant les tatouages d''un jeune soldat revenu d''Irak... Deux vampires prisonniers d''une citronneraie brulée par le soleil tentent désespérément d''étancher leur soif de sang, au risque de mettre un terme à leur relation immortelle... Autant de mondes parallèles fascinants, entre mythe et réalité, qui confirment la subtile extravagance et l''inventivité hors pair d''un des meilleurs écrivains de sa génération. « Inspirée par George Saunders, Stephen King ou encore Carson McCullers, Karen Russell a une voix bien à elle, tour à tour lyrique et drôle, fantastique et méditative. » The New York Times

Uma epidemia assola os Estados Unidos. Milhares de pessoas perdem a capacidade de dormir. Conheça a Corpo do Sono, uma organização que persuade sonhadores saudáveis a fazer doações para os insones. Sob o comando dos enigmáticos irmãos Storch, o alcance da Corpo do Sono só cresce, e ela já está presente nas principais cidades norte-americanas. Trish Edgewater, cuja irmã, Dori, foi uma das primeiras vítimas da insônia letal, há sete anos recruta doadores para a organização. Mas sua crença na empresa e nas próprias motivações começa a vacilar quando ela é confrontada com a Bebê A, a primeira doadora universal, e com o misterioso e maligno Doador Q.